Defence lawyers for ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein returned to court on Monday to present a list of conditions for ending their boycott of his genocide trial but left after they were rebuffed.
Saddam, seven co-defendants, chief defence counsel Khalil al-Dulaimi and another member of the defence team filed into the Iraqi High Tribunal for the hearing, but instead of listening to evidence made a string of complaints.
Al-Dulaimi branded the case against Saddam as political and said it lacked the “conditions for a fair trial”.
He and his fellow defence counsel clashed with the judge then left, their boycott apparently still in place.
His 12-point list of demands included one that non-Iraqi Arabs be allowed to appear as defence lawyers and that the court investigate an alleged beating of defendant Hussein Rashid by court bailiffs.
Defence lawyers had been boycotting the case since September in protest at alleged political interference in proceedings, in particular the sacking of the first trial judge Abdullah al-Ameri.
Ameri was replaced by Judge Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifah after he angered Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government by saying in open court that he did not consider Saddam to have been a dictator.
On Monday, Khalifah denied the request for Arab lawyers to be allowed to attend, saying it was decision made by his sacked predecessor and would stand.
He also intervened to order Dulami not to refer to Saddam as “Mr President” or “your excellency”.
“There is no president in this court except the president of the court… There are legal terms such as ‘the defendant’ or ‘my client’,” he said.
“There is no law that prevents me from calling my president my president,” retorted Dulaimi, “The defence team insist on calling him the president.”
A lawyer acting for Rashid, the former deputy chief of operations in Saddam’s army, alleged that after a hearing on October 10 his client had been assualted.
“My client is a prisoner of war in the custody of the US army because he is a top military commander in the Iraqi army,” he declared.
“Therefore the US government represented by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is responsible for the safety of my client. If this occupation had not happened, no one would have dared to touch my client,” he said.
The lawyer claimed his client had required hospital treatment and had been held in solitary confinement for two days. He demanded an investigation. Both defence lawyers left court after these exchanges, leaving only court-appointed counsel to represent the defendants, counsel whom Saddam immediately rejected.
The trial has continued in the absence of a defence, with Saddam and his alleged henchmen represented by court-appointed lawyers, and there have been several angry scenes of protest in the dock by the defendants.
Meanwhile, a succession of Kurdish villagers have testified that their villages were destroyed in bomb and gas attacks and they were dragged off to a network of prison camps where thousands were murdered or died of disease.
Prosecutors allege that 182Â 000 Kurds died in the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which government forces razed thousands of villages in northern Iraq.
Saddam faces the death penalty if convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He and his fellow accused insist Anfal was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation against separatist guerrillas. – AFP